Sounds like it’s time for Palmer Luckey to bust out the bikini again.
On Thursday, everyone’s favorite teeny tiny defense startup Anduril announced that their Dive-XL autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) was tapped by the Defense Innovation Unit and the US Navy for the Combat Autonomous Maritime Platform (CAMP) drone sub program.
Deep Dive: In case you’re unfamiliar with Anduril’s maritime tech game (which was spun out of the company’s acquisition of Dive Technologies in 2022), the Dive-XL is a beast of a sub-sea drone:
- It can stay underwater for weeks at a time, has a max range of 2,000 nautical miles, and can carry up to three payloads (or one extra big one).
- It fits into commercial shipping containers and can be launched from a range of ships or piers.
- It’s pretty much the Ghost Shark XL Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (XL-AUVs) that Anduril snagged a $1.7B contract to build for the Royal Australian Navy back in September.
- And if you’re wondering what the Navy might want to hide in there, Anduril rolled out a torpedo designed to be launched by uncrewed systems, like the Dive, called the Copperhead-M last year.
CAMPing trip: Those specs are pretty much tailor-made for the DIU’s CAMP program, announced last April to “maximize operational effectiveness in contested environments.” CAMP called for an underwater vehicle that could:
- Operate in GPS-denied environments for long periods of time with a range greater than 1,000 nautical miles.
- Dive over 656 feet deep to deploy “various payloads to the sea floor” (including very specific payloads that are 21 feet in length and 21 inches in diameter).
- Be transported and recovered by existing equipment.
And Anduril’s already on the clock. Under the program, Anduril’s expected to deliver a “long-duration, operationally representative demonstration” of Dive-XL within 4 months.
“[AUVs] allow the United States and its allies to extend reach, hold risk at distance, and operate persistently in contested environments,” the company said in a statement. “For the US Navy, CAMP is a significant step forward—enabling experimentation with XL-AUVs at meaningful scale and establishing a deliberate pathway toward wide-scale adoption and operational deployment.”
Money moves: As it turns out, the Dive-XL selection for CAMP was just the start of a big few days for everyone’s favorite defense tech darling.
Last night, the Pentagon announced that it awarded Anduril with a 10-year, $20B (yes, billion with a B) firm-fixed-price contract to “consolidate current and future commercial solutions,” including its Lattice software and integrated hardware, “into a unified, mission-ready capability supporting the Army’s evolving operational and business needs.”
We’ll have more on that later, but for now, we’ll just say that Anduril’s multi-domain empire keeps getting bigger.